Kubrick meets King. Both critics and audiences had mixed reactions to Stanley Kubrick’s cold, spacious 1980 rendering of Stephen King’s bestseller, and his adaptation of The Shining – but their qualms are exactly what, to me, make this a masterpiece of suspense.
Source material, much like actors, was merely a tool for Kubrick, a handy instrument to facilitate his vision.
From the opening credit sequence, we know we’re in for something different. The sky’s eye shot of giantess mountains and plunging ravine, surrounding the crisp calm of a vast lake, attain something very much beyond landscape status.
Voiced by Wendy Carlos’ ominous score, this landscape is presented as an aloof, coldly malevolent intelligence: When we spot the speck that is the family car, carrying its unlucky contents toward their fate, it is no accident that it recalls the diminutive insignificance of an ant.
Perhaps more so than any director before him, Stanley Kubrick allowed his films’ soundtracks to be more than idle bystanders: Before Kubrick, music did lend emotive emphasis to key scenes, and served to coax audiences’ expectations and reactions – but in his films, the scenes are infused by the music. The scores lend body to his famously sparse visuals, sometimes claiming centerstage.
The music is so intimately woven into Kubrick’s The Shining that it slips one’s conscious attention; it becomes a haunting – a visitation on one’s subconscious, where it goes about patiently notching up our discomfort, our paranoia.
If music is the central ghost of The Shining, its other major character, unexpectedly, is not Jack Nicholson’s gleefully demoniacal eyebrows. It is the Overlook Hotel, the ghost-town-in-a-building in whose menacing embrace the three main (living) characters find themselves trapped.
Stanley Kubrick’s taking on of what was essentially a pop novel surprised many, but in fact his visual style (oft bemoaned by desperately smug critics) – cold, empty, veinless – was tailor-made to convey a ghost story. Rarely has such simple, innocent objects as a carpet, or tennis ball, caused quite as much squirming in seats. Additionally, the movie seems to be stitched together by now-classic shots.
All three central performances are spot-on, with Shelley Duval (the wife) going so far as to mirror her character’s mental breakdown in real life (she barely survived filming, and took an extended break from acting after the experience), while Nicholson chompingly feasts on his script, no cutlery required.
A claustrophobic labyrinth; butler-fellated, lifesize teddybear; a psychopathic one-sentence novel; creepy twins; Room 237; and an ax. What more do you need?
[First published in Muse magazine.]
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